CI/CD Course

An introductory course on Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD), with a final project that runs on GitHub Actions.

Course objectives

After completing the lessons, you will be able to:

• distinguish continuous integration, delivery, and deployment;
• explain the stages of a pipeline;
• write automated tests for Bash scripts;
• configure triggers, jobs, and steps in GitHub Actions;
• apply basic quality and security controls;
• diagnose failures and improve a pipeline.

Prerequisites

• basic Git and terminal knowledge;
• a GitHub account;
• Bash and Git installed;
• a repository where you can create workflows.

Learning path

Lesson	Topic	Practical outcome
01	CI/CD fundamentals	Distinguish CI, delivery, and deployment
02	Pipeline anatomy	Design a validation flow
03	Automated testing	Write reliable Bash tests
04	Continuous Delivery	Prepare a deliverable artifact
05	GitHub Actions	Understand the final workflow
06	Operations and best practices	Evolve the pipeline securely

Final project

The project uses scripts/backup.sh to create compressed backups with SHA-256 checksums. The suite in tests/test_backup.sh tests creation, restoration, integrity, exclusions, and invalid input. Run it locally:

bash tests/test_backup.sh

The pipeline in .github/workflows/ci.yml runs the same checks on every push and pull_request. On a push to main, it also creates and uploads a verifiable backup artifact, representing the continuous delivery stage.

Use the utility:

mkdir -p backups
bash scripts/backup.sh ./data ./backups/data.tar.gz
cd backups
sha256sum --check data.tar.gz.sha256

How to study

1. Read one lesson at a time.
2. Run the examples in your terminal.
3. Answer the review questions without referring to the lesson.
4. Change the script, add a test, and observe the pipeline.